Wednesday 18 June 2014

Nice Languages Finish Last

I am writing things in Lua. Lua is a nice language, everybody keeps telling me so.

A very compelling use case for Lua is to use it as a scriptable configuration file. You can imagine how wonderful that would be:

Client wants to get configuration elements from the environment. They can already do that.

Client wants to get configuration from a different file with a weird proprietary format. They can already do that.

Client wants to use the most recent different file from a whole directory of them. They can already... Wait. They can't do that! They want to perhaps sleep for a bit and then check again. They can't do that either. You see Lua is a nice language and doesn't have a massive bloated API that can do everything. Python, Perl, or PHP could have done those things, because they are not nice.

They are useful.

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